Supporters of project management templates will try to tell you this is the only way to ensure best practices are embedded in project planning. While templates provide some form of guidelines that ensures information completeness, they have their limitations and drawbacks.

Since being promoted to the new position of manager of operations, I have detected an aloofness from my team. I feel like an outsider. But how to manage former teammates? Congratulations on your promotion. I know that there will be a lot of challenges associated with your new job. One of them is the feelings …

Airline learns from crisis management mistakes Southwest Airlines is no stranger to crisis management, just earlier this month coping with a messy communication situation after a flight was forced to make an emergency landing due to a a ruptured fuselage, so when a landing flight not only slid off of a runway in Chicago, but …

In my organization it was decided we had depended on technology and already available computer training too long. The leadership and management had to admit that there were knowledge gaps in our workforce. People with valuable corporate knowledge were leaving or retiring who we couldn’t replace for budget reasons, but we still needed to get …

As stated in my previous two posts, training sessions can be a dreaded activity by many. Despite research that tells us lecture is not learning, it is still the most used delivery method. And with current updates in technology the lecture is often supported with a deck of PowerPoint slides filled with the words being spoken by the presenter often times while reading directly from the screen or his printed copy. It is not surprising that this is the most common method. It is the easiest to develop and control and it is what learners often expect. This may just be why they dread coming to training.

Even the best laid plans can go awry, and we all have tough times in business. It can be challenging to close major sales, get the growth we want, and our competitors tend to throw up obstacles. Through all this, how do you stay motivated? What works for you may not work for someone else. …

A reporter came to interview Mahatma Gandhi one day. It turned out this was his day of silent fasting, but the reporter still insisted on getting Gandhi’s message to the world. Ghandi wrote: My Life Is My Message. In a business world where many hours and dollars are often spent crafting that perfect positioning statement …

One of the main reasons companies go out of business is for lack of cash. These companies may even be growing, successful in the market — but they run out of cash. Don’t let this happen to you. Make sure you prepare cash flow projections on a regular basis. One time of great risk is …

What happens when we stop talking face-to-face? Nothing and everything. This has been my theme since I wrote a science fiction novel on the subject. When society gets lazy and decides the tough questions about running the world are best answered by a machine–an evolving artificial intelligence, a computer server I call “Makr,” the world …

The way you hear some social enterprisers talk, you’d think it’s an inherently good thing to lose money, or if you have to make a profit, keep it small. For example, the new Low-Profit Limited Liability (L3C) corporate structure, which allows an SE to have social objectives and attract investors, has that low profit mentality …